American Colonial Wealth Estimates, 1774 (ICPSR 7329)

This study was the outcome of an extensive research project
that cataloged and analyzed the various types of wealth that existed
in the American colonies in 1774, just before the Revolution. Data
about 919 decedents having resided in 21 colonial counties in both
rural and urban settings were collected from county probate records in
the New England colonies, the Middle Colonies, New York, and the
South. WEALTH OF A NATION TO BE: THE AMERICAN COLONIES ON THE EVE OF
THE REVOLUTION (see Related Literature associated with this study) discusses the entire
project, providing tables, graphs, summaries, and
conclusions. AMERICAN COLONIAL WEALTH, DOCUMENTS AND METHODS includes
some documentation for the codes used as well as the verbatim listings
of the probate files of the 919 persons studied.

This study was the outcome of an extensive research project
that cataloged and analyzed the various types of wealth that existed
in the American colonies in 1774, just before the Revolution. Data
about 919 decedents having resided in 21 colonial counties in both
rural and urban settings were collected from county probate records in
the New England colonies, the Middle Colonies, New York, and the
South. WEALTH OF A NATION TO BE: THE AMERICAN COLONIES ON THE EVE OF
THE REVOLUTION (see Related Literature associated with this study) discusses the entire
project, providing tables, graphs, summaries, and
conclusions. AMERICAN COLONIAL WEALTH, DOCUMENTS AND METHODS includes
some documentation for the codes used as well as the verbatim listings
of the probate files of the 919 persons studied.

Access Notes

One or more data files in this study are set up in a non-standard format, such as card image format. Users
may need help converting these files before they can be used for analysis.

Data in this collection are available only to users at ICPSR member institutions.
Please log in so we can determine if you are with a member institution and have
access to these data files.

Dataset(s)

WARNING: Because this study has many datasets, the download all files option has been suppressed, and you will need to download one dataset at a time.

Universe:
Probate inventories issued in 1774 for decedents from the
American colonies.

Data Type(s):
administrative records data

Methodology

Sample:
The sample design aimed to ensure representativeness.
Contiguous counties were grouped into units of approximately 20,000
wealthholders, out of which a representative county was drawn based
on the number of wealthholders in each county. The cases in the
sample were then weighted, first to reflect the age distribution of
the total population, and then to take into account those individuals
who did not have their estates probated.

Time Method:
Cross-sectional

Weight:
For a description of the weights and their intended usage, please see Jones, Alice Hanson. American Colonial Wealth: Documents And Methods. New York: Arno Press, 1977, Section VI: Weighting Procedures.

Data Source:

county probate records

Extent of Processing: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of
disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major
statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to
these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Created variable labels and/or value labels.

Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

Version(s)

Original ICPSR Release: 1984-05-11

Version History:

2012-09-11 SAS, SPSS, and Stata setups, as well as SPSS and Stata system files, and SAS transport (CPORT) files have been added to this collection. The data for Dataset 8 (Wealth Summary for Middle Colonies: Middle Colonies) have been converted from ASCII card-image format to ASCII column-delimited format. The data for Dataset 4 have been cleaned up by removing non-ASCII characters. The codebook has been updated.

2006-01-18 File CB7329.ALL.PDF was removed from any previous datasets and flagged as a study-level file, so that it will accompany all downloads.